Yesterday, I wrote with a sense of urgency, about the need for Americans to start questioning their materialistic excesses. And I advocated in no uncertain terms, for a shift in individual behaviors. Not everybody agrees. Last month I attended an E2 presentation by Rick Duke, Director of Center for Innovation at NRDC, and also ex-McKinsey consultant. The topic was a recent McKinsey report on ‘Reducing U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions: How Much at What Cost?‘. The ground-breaking study was co-sponsored by a group of environmental and corporate heavy weights: NRDC, DTE Energy, Environmental Defense, Honeywell, National Grid, PG&E, and Shell. From E2:
What the E2 summary does not cover, is the point Rick Duke made during his presentation about Americans not needing to make sacrifices in their way of life. This assumes the U.S. implement the policies recommended in the McKinsey report. The sigh of relief in the audience was palpable. You mean, I can keep going. The powers in charge will take care of things? Peter Waldman, also present during the presentation, protested that policy innovation was no substitute for some of the hard choices citizens ought to make. Choices such as driving less and consuming less.
Rick Duke‘s answer: sure, it’s great if people green their lifestyles, but what are the odds? In the mean time, let us forge ahead with policy innovation. I agree with him, and I also want to point the danger of his concurrent message. We cannot afford the luxury of ignoring the role of individual behaviors. It will take all, policy makers, businesses, and citizens, to reach a carbon neutral state.
La Marguerite 
Both Matter
I agree completely that both policy innovation and (some) changes in individual attitudes and behavior will be necessary. Indeed, they also inform and influence each other. The right policy shifts will help make eco-healthy behaviors easier and more likely, and some policy won’t shift without some degree of passion and insistence on the part of individuals. I think the various pieces of the big picture must complement each other.
Also, the policy changes, as vital as they are, will be key to our efforts to address global warming, as parts of the solution, but it’s hard to expect them to address some of the deeper, contributing, and related problems: For one thing, no matter how efficient we are likely to become, if we keep increasing our consumption like it’s “1999” (as the song goes), we’ll still run into consumption-oriented problems. Also, there’s the matter of population.
I’ve read the full McKinsey report that you mention, and (in the interest of disclosure) I was a McKinsey consultant in the late 1980s. I think the report is great. Yet, the notions of a “cap-and-auction” system or “cap-and-trade” system or carbon tax are not getting the coverage and explanation that they deserve in the mainstream press. That said, all three of the presidential candidates still standing support, I think, one of these approaches. To what degree, and how vigorously, I don’t know. But, it seems to me that these notions are still considered “bad words” to an extent, to be avoided in discussion when possible.
In summary, vote wisely AND buy an efficient car (or better yet, bike). Both matter.
Cheers.
Yes. There is also the issue of how ambitious we need to be with reductions. If we want to be more aggressive than the McKinsey report – which I believe we need to be – then, there is no doubt that significant behavioral changes will be requires.
Marguerite, just a quick followup post:
I agree with your points in your post #2.
The McKinsey report itself describes three scenarios. I don’t have it in front of me right now, so I forget their names. The third scenario is the most ambitious, but we may well need to go farther. Science will tell us, hopefully, with increasing accuracy as time passes.
But, in general, I agree with your point about needing quick, effective, healthy action on the personal level (as well as on the policy level).
As an aside, I personally think that, on an issue such as this (global warming), McKinsey should be more assertive regarding the need for change and regarding specific recommendations. The report (as helpful as it is) is mainly one of information, analysis, scenarios, insights, hints, and the presentation of options. It doesn’t directly say, “we urge these particular actions.” That seems overly cautious (and one could easily argue, irresponsible) in my view. So, although I applaud the report from most standpoints, I think McKinsey could and should do much more on this particular matter, of vital importance to the world.
Let’s put it this way: Either, somehow, the majority of scientists today are wrong (in their concern about climate change and its likely causes) OR there will come a time when organizations that have not acted to address the issue in the most energetic and vital ways possible will have to explain why they didn’t do so. One of those organizations is ExxonMobil, of course. Another is The New York Times. And, although the McKinsey report is very helpful, McKinsey could and should be doing more, in my view. So, they may also have some big explaining to do, eventually?
I, for one, sincerely hope that McKinsey decides to do much more on the issue and to speak out much more vocally.
Cheers.
in the interest of public fairness, i believe that man needs to at least unlearn the very behaviors he has inflicted upon nature.
being an obstinate animal; that will be a difficult reversal.
a) start in kindergarden and pre-school.
b) incorporate parental ecology in high-school lifeskills classes.
c) encourage adult education ecology classes.
volunteers with knowledge must pop out of the public and educate their peers in stimulating formats. picnics, park meets, Ymca, boy/girl scouts, baseball leagues, wherever people gather…
oh, and blog away especially outside of the green media, seep slowly into the reticent consumer driven world.
one good word at a time, each one can breach into the cemented corporate walls and form a flexible interactive body.
Nadine, I totally agree with you on a blogging infiltration strategy. We tend to talk amongst ourselves, and that can only go so far. The other day, I left a comment on one of the top blogs for gadgets – do you know these are on top of Technorati list? . . . – and one of the guys asked me why I was commenting on their site. My answer was, ‘exactly for the reason that you are questioning my commenting’. Celebrity, political, news, sports, shopping are all categories of blog that are ripe for infiltration!
We talk among ourselves because it’s a natural human thing to seek out and associate with like-minded others. The purpose of most communication is community, not persuasion.
Don’t worry, in a few years all these schlubs now abusing us will be saying, “oh yes, I knew that all along.”
Not about details like whether wind or solar are better, but they’ll be saying they always knew about the threats of climate change and resource depletion, and they always limited their own consumption and emissions, etc. It’s a bit like how when the Allies went into Germany, nobody could find a single convinced Nazi. “Vot, me? Nein, nein, strictly non-political.” And when the Red Army showed up, about 123% of the population turned out to be former members of the Social Democrats.
Once you get enough hurricanes or fuel shortages, you won’t find a single climate change or peak oil denier. “Oh, I always knew…”
It’s natural, and it feels good to be amongst a community of like-minded people. I agree.
My concern, however is how to advance the climate fight cause, and figure out change strategies. Hence, my interest in infiltration tactics. Not preaching or lecturing. Rather, relating, which is very different.
I wish I could remember where I read it… someone was writing that how new ideas get through is, first they undermine current ideas. Tear apart what they’ve got and then offer them something new. It’s a bit like how on Recruit Course they break you down to build you up again, knock down the civilian before they build up the soldier.
So for example,
“So, the IPCC is saying we’d have to reduce our emissions to like two tonnes each to avoid catastrophic climate change. That’d be one tonne for the household stuff we can control, like our cars and power.”
“Oh? How much do we emit now?”
“About 24 tonnes. That’s 12 per household.”
“Wow! No way we could reduce to one-twelfth, that’s crazy, we’d have to live like the frickin’ Stone Age. Oh well, I’ll keep driving my SUV.”
“Actually, a one-tonne CO2 lifestyle isn’t that bad. For example, you might live like this. It’s a different lifestyle, but not a worse one.”
In that kind of conversation, I’m undermining the current idea that change is impossible because we’d have to live so badly. And there I’m undermining deeper ideas from the side, ideas about how to have a decent life you have to buy heaps of stuff, and so on. It’s like how on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland one, some of the ice isn’t on land but is on the seabed. So warmer water melts that, and it slides down – and the ice on the land, supported by the ice on the sea, that slides down, too. Eventually it’ll all crumble into the sea.
I try to do that with people’s ideas, slowly undermining little ideas people have, because those little ideas support the bigger ideas. The idea, “Reducing to one-twelfth current emissions is impossible” is a small one, a small idea that supports the bigger idea, “buying lots of stuff is good” or “any life except this one is the Stone Age.”
That’s the theory, anyway.
I think there is a lot of merit to radicalism, if only for shock value, and also authenticity. My hunch is you probably need both, radicalism, and subtle infiltration.
It’s not easy trying to wrestle with, and change, cultural paradigms. But, it’s interesting to reflect on something that Gandhi once said,
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
– Gandhi
Great quote!
“Now whenever things are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you’ve seen the same thing. It’s energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean inside out.”
HG Wells, War of the Worlds
A “funk” in this context is a disused English word meaning a sort of nervous and agitated depression.
Saying that The Market! or Science! will save us is another “do-nothing religion”. The end result is that we sit about doing nothing waiting to be saved, like infants waiting for their parents.
LaMarguerite, thanks for this post. I believe that No Impact Man had a similar type ‘argument’ about asceticism vs. technology advances
http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/a-few-weeks-bac.html
Anyways, I like your idea that people who have made great strides in reducing their consumption levels might try to relate to others in an effort to show how such a lifestyle isn’t necessarily asceticism or wearing a hairshirt after all. I must say, as a light green mother, that reading enviroblogs like Fake Plastic Fish and Green As A Thistle among others for about 3 months has given me countless ideas about how to green our lifestyle. Now, I may be part of the choir, as a progressive ‘eco-mom’ but the blogosphere has had a fantastic impact on our family’s efforts. We were already recycling etc — the basics — but this year we’ve dramatically curtailed our plastics consumption, shifted the bulk of our purchases to locally-sourced food, and done probably 2 dozen other random small things we’d never have thought of if it weren’t for other, greener people putting the ideas in our heads (like using greywater, or getting reusable produce bags not just carrying reusable shopping bags, or –my fave — getting scientific opinions on just how drinkable our water supply is so that we could shift back to tap water). Thanks for being part of the blogosphere that’s greener than me so I can learn from you.
I think asceticism is an interesting one. It appeals to some people (me, for instance) on a political and spiritual level. So it doesn’t turn me off from environmentalism. But since I have been trying to accelerate our green efforts as a family, I can say truthfully that some of my enviro efforts are not at all hard. It doesn’t change my world AT ALL to order my turkey bologna for my kids to be wrapped in wax paper rather than a plastic bag. That’s the kind of paradigm shift that’s all in people’s heads. I can’t quite capture it in words, but it’s not asceticism. Maybe just a paradigm shift? Anyways, (thanks Burbanmom for the tip) stuff like that is easy and I agree, if we all as consumers asked for different things then maybe corporations and policies would change too. Both interrelated.
You would enjoy reading Kyle’s blog over at Green with a gun (click on Kiashu, just above your comment). He has written lots of very interesting articles on that very subject – being able to make a big difference on the environment by making some lifestyle changes that don’t make a dent in one’s ‘lifestyle’. You may also enjoy going back to my post in Green Tips section, on all the ways to go green for the lazy green wannabe (not the exact title but something like that . . .)
Will do, tx for the tips, LM!
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